Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali-Italian writer, poet, playwright and librettist. Raised in Mogadishu, she left Somalia in 1991 at the outbreak of the civil war and has since lived in Italy and other European countries. Her writing moves across languages, places and generations, exploring the ways in which stories preserve and transform memory, identity and cultural experience.
She is the author of the novels Little Mother (Madre piccola, Frassinelli, 2007; new edition 66thand2nd, 2022), winner of the Premio Vittorini, Commander of the River (Il comandante del fiume, 66thand2nd, 2014), and Stations of the Moon (Le stazioni della luna, 66thand2nd, 2021). Little Mother and Commander of the River were both published in English by Indiana University Press as part of the Global African Voices series. Her works have also been translated into French, German and Dutch. She has published short stories, poetry, essays and artist’s books, including La danza dell’orice, I capelli del giuggiolo and The Phoenix’s Ashes (Le ceneri della fenice).
Her literary practice has developed in constant dialogue with research, oral history and collaborative work. Over the years, she has created projects focusing on the memory of women in the Somali diaspora, migrant narratives, multilingualism and the oral transmission of stories. In 2021, thirty years after the outbreak of the civil war, she was able to return to Somalia, where she collaborated with the United Nations Development Programme on projects exploring oral history and writing as tools for dialogue and peacebuilding.
She has taught and given courses, workshops and lectures at universities and cultural institutions across Europe, Africa, North America and Australia, including Brown University, Yale, Oxford, Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Melbourne and Roma Tre University, where she taught Somali Language and Literature. She has also taken part in numerous international literary and research residencies.
She holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, where her research focused on Somali popular theatre, and a degree in Italian Literature from Sapienza University of Rome.